Profile of Article 36

Charli Carpenter has written an interesting profile of the humanitarian disarmament organization Article 36 on the blog Duck of Minerva. She argues that “Article 36’s establishment fills an important structural gap in the human security network: the absence of a hub NGO in the area of humanitarian arms control.” Carpenter believes Article 36 can help knit together the disapate communities working on controling the humanitarian impacts of landmines, cluster munitions, small arms, nuclear weapons, toxic weapons, explosive weapons and armed robots, as well as advocacy efforts on issues like casuality data collection.

The heads of Article 36, recently outlined their agenda for ‘restarting disarmament’ in an article for Open Democracy. They argue that “Civil society coalitions, with public engagement and support” have the power to “urge states to create that space and not to fall back on the established disarmament machinery as a fig leaf for their own lack of courage and commitment.”

I too am a fan of what Article 36 is doing — focusing on the broad problem of technologies of killing rather than focussing solely on particular weapons systems — and recently worked with them on preparing this statement on banning autonomous armed robots.